The Russian pronoun TAM as a marker of anaphora to an argument

The present article addresses a special use of the Russian locative pronoun tam: the use represented in examples like ‘I talked to her — no understanding of the situation there’. In those contexts, tam refers to a participant (usually animate), rather than a location. After a brief sketch of other uses, I describe the rules and restrictions on the ‘argument’ use of tam. Then, I analyze the role of this use in the Russian pronoun system and relations with the other uses of this pronoun. I propose that this use is mainly related to two others: collective tam (including its minimal variant, referring to a family / pair of humans) and situational, where tam refers to some situation. The function of the ‘argument’ use is demotion of the participant salience: contrary to on ‘he’, the ‘argument’ tam shows that the participant is not salient enough to be the main topic of the text or a part of the text and describes it simply as a location of some properties.